Neocons vs. the ‘Arab Spring’: Back on the Warpath

Neocons vs. the ‘Arab Spring’: Back on the
Warpath

The neoconservatives are back with a
vengeance. While popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen
and other Arab countries had briefly rendered them
irrelevant in the region, Western intervention in Libya
signaled a new opportunity. Now Syria promises to usher a
full return of neoconservatives into the Middle East
fray.

“Washington must stop subcontracting Syria policy
to the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. They are clearly part of
the anti-Assad effort, but the United States cannot tolerate
Syria becoming a proxy state for yet another regional
power,” wrote Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign
and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise
Institute (Washington Post, July 20).

Pletka, like many of
her peers from neoconservative, pro-Israeli ‘think
tanks’, should be a familiar name among Arab reporters,
who are also well aware of the level of destruction brought
to the Middle East as a result of neoconservative wisdom and
policies. Rarely though are such infamous names evoked when
the ongoing conflict in Syria is reported - as if the main
powers responsible for redrawing the geopolitical maps of
the region are suddenly insignificant.

Pletka was the
biggest supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, the once exiled Iraqi,
who she once described as “a trusted associate of the
Central Intelligence Agency (and) the key player in a
unsuccessful coup to overthrow Saddam Hussein” in the
1990s (LA Times, June 4, 2004). Chalabi led the Iraqi
National Congress, which was falsely slated as an authentic
Iraqi national initiative. Eventually, members of the
council, composed mostly of Iraqi exiles with links to the
CIA and other Western intelligences, managed to sway the
pendulum their way, and Iraq was destroyed.

Although the
destruction of an Arab country is not a moral issue as far
as the neocons are concerned, the chaos and subsequent
violence that followed the US war in 2003 made it impossible
for warring ‘intellectuals’ to promote their ideas with
the same language of old. Some reinvention was now
necessary. Discredited organizations were shut down and new
ones were hastily founded. One such platform was the Foreign
Policy Initiative, which was founded by neoconservatives who
cleverly reworded old slogans. Matt Duss, wrote in
ThinkProgress.org about the Foreign Policy Initiative
inaugural conference on Afghanistan in March 2009: “I was
struck by how very little that was said was
controversial,” he wrote. “And that’s really the point
— in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons are
widely and rightly held responsible, it simply won’t do to
bang the drum for American military maximalism. One has to
be a bit slicker than that. And these guys are nothing if
not slick.”

Slick, indeed, as neoconservatives are now
trying to weasel in their version of an endgame in Syria.
Their efforts are extremely focused and well-coordinated,
making impressive use of their direct ties with the Israeli
lobby, major US media and Syrian leaders in exile. They are
being referred to as ‘foreign policy experts’, although
their ‘expertise’ is merely confined to their ability to
destroy and remake countries to their own liking – and
even these are unmitigated failures.

Writing in CNN
online, Elise Labott reported on a recent neoconservative
push to upgrade American involvement in Syria: “Foreign
policy experts on Wednesday (August 1) urged the Obama
administration to increase its support of the armed
opposition.” The ‘experts’ included Andrew Tabler of
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP),
another pro-Israel conduit in Washington. It was established
in 1985 as a research department for the influential Israeli
lobby group, AIPAC, yet since then it managed to rebrand
itself as an American organization concerned with advancing
“a balanced and realistic understanding of American
interests in the Middle East.”

Obama, of course, obliged
under pressure from the ‘experts’. According to CNN, he
signed a secret order “referred to as an intelligence
‘finding,’ allow[ing] for clandestine support by the CIA
and other agencies.”

Still, the neocons want much more.
The bloodbath in Syria has devastated not only Syrian
society, it also brought to a halt the collective campaigns
in Arab societies which called for democracy on their own
terms. The protracted conflict in Syria, and the involvement
of various regional players made it unbearable for the
neoconservatives to hide behind their new brand and slowly
plot a comeback. For them, it was now or never.

On July
31, AIPAC wrote all members of Congress urging them to sign
on a bill introduced by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard
Berman. Entitled ‘The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria
Human Rights Act (H.R.1905)’, the bill, if passed, “will
establish virtual state of war with Iran,” according to
the Council for the National Interest. The old
neoconservative wisdom arguing for an unavoidable link
between Syria, Iran and their allies in the region is now
being exploited to the maximum.

A few days earlier, on
July 27, fifty-six leading 'conservative foreign-policy
experts' had urged Obama to intervene directly in Syria.
“Unless the United States takes the lead and acts, either
individually or in concert with like-minded nations,
thousands of additional Syrian civilians will likely die,
and the emerging civil war in Syria will likely ignite wider
instability in the Middle East.”

The timing of the
letter, partly organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative,
was hardly random. It was published one day before the first
‘Friends of Syria’ contact-group meeting in Tunisia,
which suggests that it was aimed to help define the American
agenda regarding Syria. Signatories included familiar names
associated with the Iraq war narrative - Paul Bremer,
Elizabeth Cheney, Eric Edelman, William Kristol, and, of
course, Danielle Pletka.

With the absence of a clear US
strategy regarding Syria, the ever-organized
neoconservatives seem to be the only ones with a clear plan,
however damaging. In her Washington Post piece, Pletka’s
argument for intervention, bridging countries, peoples,
sects and groups of all kinds - as if the Middle East is but
a chess game governed by delusional but persistent
ambitions. In one single paragraph, she made mention of
Iran, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps,
terrorists aimed at destabilizing Iraq, “puppet
governments in Beirut” and “Palestinian terror groups
dedicated to Israel’s destruction.”

Yet, it is this
sort of ‘political expertise’ that governed US foreign
policy in the Middle East for nearly two decades. Now that
the short respite is over, the neoconservatives are back
with their bizarre maps, bleak visions, and a fail-proof
recipe for perpetual
conflict.

*************

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an
internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of
PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a
Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press,
London.)

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